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Barcelona’s Best Plan B Might Be in Everton

Barcelona's Gerard Piqué, left, walked away as Athletic Bilbao players celebrated their 1-0 victory in Bilbao on Sunday. It was Barcelona's first loss in the league this year.Credit
Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press

LONDON — When Barcelona loses its footing and loses two games in five days, it can feel like losing a friend.

How fickle we are sometimes. What nonsense is said and written about a club that has developed such a philosophy that its team — and the Spanish national team filled with many of its players — has managed to beguile us at the same time it has won world titles.

But with Lionel Messi and a whole host of others sidelined through the inevitable strains of playing too much comes instant recrimination. Tiki-taka, the style of passing and movement that served them so well, is dead in the eyes of critics.

It may be temporarily out of service.

Messi is back in Argentina, recuperating after his recurring hamstring problem proved that he needs time and patience. Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta, those little masters of both passing and chasing interminable successes for club and country, are not getting any younger.

Carles Puyol keeps coming back from brutal injuries, but he is no longer a defender for two games every week. Jordi Alba and Dani Alves, fullbacks who run like wingers, have taken knocks that rule them out for a few games.

Even the goalkeeper, Victor Valdés, is getting treated for injuries instead of blocking shots.

So Barça traveled to Ajax Amsterdam and took a beating last week in the Arena. It was a loss the Catalan team could afford because its place in the next round of the Champions League is already certain.

Then Barcelona journeyed on to Bilbao and was run down, 1-0, against the Basque side, a home team that could prepare all week long for the contest on Sunday. Athletic Bilbao is deeply proud of its own style, its own insistence that only a Basque can wear the shirt.

And since the new 53,000-seat San Mamés Stadium opened this season, no visiting team has yet been able to still the rampant running or the tigerish pressure of Athletic on its home turf.

Speaking of turf, how strange it appeared that a player the caliber of Neymar, the Brazilian on Barça’s left wing and a poster boy for Nike, should take almost the whole of the first half to change his footwear.

He slipped at crucial moments. He, and others, had clearly misjudged the lush, wet surface of the new San Mamés grass. But in any event, these are the weeks when Barcelona needs Neymar to grow into the shoes of the absent Messi. Apart from once stretching the home goalie to a magnificent save, Neymar was not the inspiration for Barcelona on Sunday.

Maybe that is unfair. The ball reached him all too seldom. Gerardo “Tata” Martino, who came from Argentina last summer to replace an ailing Tito Vilanova as manager, is trying to add something to Barcelona.

Photo

Gerard Deulofeu, on loan from Barcelona to Everton, scored in his first Premier League start.Credit
Phil Noble/Reuters

The new coach is responding to the call that went around the world last spring when Bayern Munich erased Barça from the Champions League. That marked the start of Messi’s hamstring problem. But all over the field, Munich got to each and every tackle, depriving Barcelona of the time to move, time to pass, time to play tiki-taka.

Where, everyone asked, was Plan B? Barça had none because the Catalan club’s coaching, from the kindergarten upward, comes from the same ethos. Pass, pass, pass. Keep the ball, move into space, exhaust the opponent, and strike when they are weary.

Martino said he came to Barcelona as an admirer of the style. He picked it up pretty well, playing 14 league games before he suffered his first defeats. Before those, there had been the worrying scoreless draw at Osasuna — also in Basque territory — when Barça failed to score for the first time in 65 La Liga matches.

But despite Atlético Madrid keeping pace atop the league and despite Real Madrid gathering steam, Barcelona holds the leading position.

Martino’s task is to try to make sure that the team does not arrive tired in the spring as it did last season. His search for that Plan B is bedeviled by the fact that, in his first 100 days as coach, he has had just 12 clear days on which to work with the squad. The rest are taken up by games in the league, the domestic cup and the Champions League, or with the players called away for national team duties.

Devising a secondary plan is, in any case, difficult in Catalonia. The way of playing is indoctrinated in the players from boyhood, and you can count Messi in that because he arrived at Barcelona’s La Masia academy when he was 13.

Xavi and Iniesta share that philosophy. Pep Guardiola, now coaching Bayern Munich, also came through that school. Guardiola wore himself out by the intensity with which he ran the team for four seasons, and he then took a year out in New York to recharge himself.

However, even in the week when Barcelona itself seemed tired and vulnerable, there is beauty to report.

Many miles from home, a Barça boy, Gerard Deulofeu, made an unforgettable starting debut in England on Saturday.

Labeled the new Messi and still in his teens, Deulofeu has been loaned to Everton for this season and possibly next.

His first goal was indeed Messi-esque in terms of his directness with the ball, his body swerve and his impudent finish.

“His quality is sublime,” observed Everton’s coach, Roberto Martínez. “He can open up spaces, and I want him to continue trying things, to express himself, to dislodge good defenses. To have that raw talent is not selfish.” Martínez is a Catalan abroad, guiding a gifted youth through getting experience in another culture. The long-term Plan B, perhaps.